Taking care with the Internet Axiom

Corners of San Francisco were alive today — both implicitly and explicitly — in espousing the power of the Internet.

At DevBeat, the first gathering of a couple hundred developers put on by VentureBeat, Tom Preston-Werner, a founder of GitHub, held a talk entitled “The Internet Axiom: Escaping the Tyranny of Time and Space.” He made a point to define the term axiom, reminding the crowd that it’s a concept that is so evident that it’s taken as true.

“I think the Internet is more powerful than even electricity,” he said. “Electricity is about moving energy. The Internet is about moving ideas.”

The crux of his talk was about how so many businesses fail to embrace the power of the Internet and highlighted how GitHub enables about three quarters of the engineering-heavy company to work remotely. But, he noted, most other businesses have not caught up.

“Most people think of it as this neat tool to sprinkle on top of stuff.” Restaurants typically just put the menu and hours online. Many government forms are just downloadable PDFs, not interactive webpages. He even talked about being locked out of his house. “You have keys because the world doesn’t understand the Internet,” he said, jangling them to the crowd.

This is the kind of impatience commonly found in the Bay Area that causes much of the rest of world to either roll its eyes or extend a middle finger toward the tech community. Visions of the future are demanded and they should have been here yesterday. Engineering minds tend to reduce models to their most efficient connections. That’s how their job works. Superfluous code slows the machine.

Some of the real irony for folks claiming the Internet is the ultimate marketplace for ideas, though, is they’re rarely interested in shopping for any that aren’t their own. If asked, a restaurant owner would probably say, “I already work 14 hour days and 99 percent of customers just want to know when we’re open and what we serve anyway.” Government officials would say, “Our forms have data that go to 13 different departments. We don’t have the budget to build those integrations.” And lock makers would probably say, “Remember your keys, genius.”

The catch — the continual catch with these situations — is that Preston-Werner describes the likely future. Websites, server integrations and app-based machinery will get easier and easier to build, along with anything else that involves a microprocessor. Basic economics says as costs fall and tools improve, so will the access to them. It just doesn’t happen overnight or over a decade, nor does it happen without effect on other people and other jobs.

Across town, housing-sharing site AirBnB unveiled a mobile app and announced a slew of gaudy user numbers that show that business is strong. But it also took the opportunity to espouse all it was doing to change the concept of hospitality, community and vacationing. The company has fought regulatory battles as governments grapple with how to tax its business as traditional hotels and motels cry foul due to differing regulations. (More depth from my colleague here)

This is where the PR department causes trouble. “There are laws for people and laws for business, but you are new category: people as businesses,” CEO Brian Chesky said. “This is a new economy, the sharing economy, it’s actually starting to feel like a revolution.” And that’s the thing: AirBnB is making transactions more efficient and creating new sources of income for people, but to start throwing around terms like “revolution” or pretending the government never considered the concept of sole proprietorship is just ridiculous.

There is a critical difference in discussing what “will” happen and what “is” happening. Few people deny that a future of optimal systems — be it keys or the travel economy — is in our best interest, and that the forces of economics and technology are pushing us in that direction. It doesn’t mean we should not go from Point A to Point B. We absolutely should. But sometimes, we need to be OK with doing it as fast as humanly possible.